Monday, 30th March 2026
Mr. Chatterbox is a (weak) Victorian-era ethically trained model you can run on your own computer
Trip Venturella released Mr. Chatterbox, a language model trained entirely on out-of-copyright text from the British Library. Here’s how he describes it in the model card:
[... 952 words]Adds the ability to configure which LLMs are available for which purpose, which means you can restrict the list of models that can be used with a specific plugin. #3
Note that the main issues that people currently unknowingly face with local models mostly revolve around the harness and some intricacies around model chat templates and prompt construction. Sometimes there are even pure inference bugs. From typing the task in the client to the actual result, there is a long chain of components that atm are not only fragile - are also developed by different parties. So it's difficult to consolidate the entire stack and you have to keep in mind that what you are currently observing is with very high probability still broken in some subtle way along that chain.
— Georgi Gerganov, explaining why it's hard to find local models that work well with coding agents
I'm working on integrating datasette-files into other plugins, such as datasette-extract. This necessitated a new release of the base plugin.
owners_can_editandowners_can_deleteconfiguration options, plus thefiles-editandfiles-deleteactions are now scoped to a newFileResourcewhich is a child ofFileSourceResource. #18- The file picker UI is now available as a
<datasette-file-picker>Web Component. Thanks, Alex Garcia. #19- New
from datasette_files import get_filePython API for other plugins that need to access file data. #20